The Lower Don Valley, A History Tour.

 

The Lower Don Valley

 

 

Of all the thousands of cities across the world, across different continents and in all kinds of environments, most have been built aside the banks of rivers. In pre industrial times, when the only ways to travel on land were on foot or horseback, water transport was by far the best way to conduct trade. Cities that grew during Roman, Medieval and renaissance times - Rome, London, Paris, Amsterdam - clustered around a trade road and a port, usually ringed by a defensive wall. For thousands of years this was the pattern, until, in the Midlands and north of 18th century England, the industrial revolution gradually came to life, changing the shape of our cities considerably. At first the very earliest factories were hidden away in remote rural communities to keep the new secrets of large scale mechanisation,.but eventually the machines and workplaces became so large that they started to build new towns and cities around them. Hitherto unremarkable market towns - Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield - started to swell in size. First using the rivers for power, through waterwheels, and transport on the new canal network that created an artificial waterway to the coastal ports. Then came reliable steam power, removing the need for water power, and then the spark that really set cities sprawling far from the river banks; the railways. Trains could bring in, and ship out, huge quantities of materials and goods compared to canals and packhorse trails. Factories and works got ever larger and employed more and more people, making the new Victorian industrial cities - in the north of England, in the midwestern 'Rust Belt' in America, and the Rhine valley in Germany - as big, and just as rich as the old medieval population centres.

 

All of this great upheaval over the centuries can be traced in the fabric of one of England's largest and oldest industrial heartlands. Covering three miles between Sheffield in the West and Rotherham in the east, the lower Don Valley has been a hive of industry for well over two hundred years, evolving through several incarnations, from the earliest days of the industrial revolution, through to it's greatest days in the height of British Victorian industrial power, to the decline of the late 20th century, and rebirth in the 21st.

 

Sheffield sits at the meeting of the Pennine hills that form the spine of northern England and the eastern flat lands heading towards the North Sea. It is a city built on hills, valleys cut by narrow, fast flowing rivers. The namesake Sheaf, the Rivelin, the Loxley, the Porter, and the Don. The Don is the largest, flowing from the high moors in the west into the north of Sheffield. It passes the town of Penistone, the suburbs of Oughtibridge and Hillsborough, where the combined forces of the Loxley and Rivelin join from the west. The river flows down towards the former industrial areas of Neepsend, and Kelham Island, before turning a corner at the periphery of the city centre where it meets the waters of the Sheaf and Porter. The river then meanders east along a wide flat plain between Sheffield and Rotherham. An Iron Age hill fort, dated to around 500 BC, once stood watch over the river and the wide expanses of the valley. The remaining mounds are clear to see in the woods behind the semi-detached houses of Wincobank. It is one of the oldest examples of habitation in the region, though not quite as old as the Neolithic remains in the high Peak District.

 

Sheffield sprawls across the valleys and rivers - there are supposedly seven hills, just as in Rome (though careful counting of the various streams and brooks can add more to that). This is a place that seems almost designed to be useful. The hills are high - from the tops on a clear day the view is long - and the cause of much difficulty in wintry conditions, but the drop generates lots of power in the rivers flowing down the valleys. All the fast water was ideal for waterwheels in the centuries before steam power came along. There is great variety underfoot and around. Sandstone, clay, and large deposits of grit stone. Solid, and ideal for making grindstones; large circular slabs of stone, with a hole punched in the middle, gritstone grinding wheels could sharpen metal blades. Coppices of woodland provided a source of fuel - charcoal.

 

The names of earlier inhabitants of the region still live on, surviving the mists of history. Once there was a Roman camp where the city centre now stands, hence the presence of a 'Campo Lane'. The Atter of Attercliffe is probably from King Aethelred. Old Norse given names Grimr and Osga still grace the map in Grimesthope and Osgathorpe. Old English meanwhile gives us Tynnae (Tinsley) and Wincoe (Wincobank). Meadow Hall, seemingly a self-evident name is thought to be an anglicised version of the old English name 'Madhou' - 'Brightside is a similar modernisation of the moniker 'Brekesherth'. One Earl Waltheof of Saxon times is commemorated in the name of school and a road. He tried to forment a revolt against the Norman conquerers but was routed and executed. He lorded over the shire of Hallam, in the Kingdom of Northumbria. The boundaries of Sheffield still follow closely the old boundaries of Hallamshire, and the name lives on all over the place, in a hospital, a university, a parliamentary constituency, and a radio station.

 

After the Normans invasion came the Baron Roger de Busli, then the de Lovetot family, and then the de Furnivals. In 1406 the Furnival line ended with marriage into the Shrewsbury family. The Earls of Shrewsbury ruled the area for the next two hundred eventful years, throughout the Hundred Years War, The Wars of the Roses (in which the second Duke was killed in battle), the death of Richard the Third on the Bosworth Battlefield, and the rise of the Tudor monarchs. All the while the Sheffield tradesmen had already become the pre-eminent metalworkers in the country, the largest concentration outside of London. Records of iron forging here lead back to the time of Henry II. The Canterbury Tales provide a name-check to what then would have been a small town of barely a thousand or so inhabitants...

 

"Ther was no man, for peril, dorste hym touche. A Sheffeld thwitel baar he in his hose".

 

For the benefit of those not adept in middle English that basically translates as "Nobody messed with him because he carried a big Sheffield knife".

 

Centuries before the industrial revolution really got going there were forges and workshops churning out huge numbers of high quality scythes, shears and knives. After the last resident Earl of Shrewsbury died, the Dukes of Norfolk took over much of the estates and their businesses. The changes led to the incorporation of the Hallamshire company of cutlers in 1624, and it continues to this day. It was a noble trade - in the ages before any kind of mechanization, scythes kept the world fed. A good blade was essential for harvesting wheat. The forges and villages were populated by working tradesmen and their families, but most were owned by the highest members of society.

 

A visitor in the time of Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare would find the area of modern South Yorkshire and northern Derbyshire filled with farms, fields and scattered villages dating back to pre-medieval times. The meeting of the Sheaf and the River Don likely provided the impetus for the beginning of settlement in Anglo Saxon times. The centrepieces in Tudor times would have been the medieval castle and Parish church. Sheffield Castle began in Norman times under Roger de Busli, continued in the age of the Furnivals and Shrewsburys. The original wooden motte and bailey Norman castle was destroyed in reprisal 1266 after the 4th Lord de Furnival supported the insurgent Simon de Montfort against the King. The later stone castle lasted until it fell in the Civil War. Siding with the Royalists, Sheffield castle was destroyed completely by the Parliamentarian forces. Not much remains of this time - nestled by the bus station is the 15th century Old Queens Head pub. The only complete building of such age in the city centre.

 

Fast forward another one hundred years and industry is booming, not just in the town centre but along the riverbanks there are forges and grinding wheels dotted everywhere. The population by 1700 was doubled to around five thousand. In 1709 the breakthrough came to smelt iron with coke from coal and that unlocked the potential of the coal fields across the country. No longer were the forges constrained by the need for trees and charcoal. The western suburbs of the city still bear some witness to their industrial past. There countless scattered remains of the small dams and wheel pits that mark the sites of works along the rivers. Above Endcliffe Park, at the side of the path stands the restored Shepherd Wheel, where the dam and water wheels power the cutler's grinding stones and buffing wheels. Further up the same valley, in the Whiteley Woods, is is a monument to Thomas Boulsover at the site of his works. Boulsover was an 18th century industrial innovator and the inventor of so-called Sheffield plate, a malleable but durable fusion of copper and silver it provided the appearance of expensive silver at a fraction of the cost - one of many Sheffield metalworking innovations, and one of the first that helped forge the foundations of city as it stands today. (A relief of Boulsover in Tudor Square adjacent to the Central Library in the city centre marks the place where he made his discovery in a Cutlers company workshop).

 

These small places have been reclaimed by picturesque trees and are a haven for dog walking, jogging and twittering bird life. It was the eastern side of the city that really took off from its humble beginnings, and where we will now take a tour in the footsteps of the past, finding the signs and sights that tell the story of the Don Valley’s industrial past, and present.

 

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We start at the edge of the city centre, walking down the road from the cathedral- everything that is visible at a glance is post mid-18th century but there are still some medieval walls forming part of the building. (Inside one can see the tombs of the fourth and sixth Earl of Shrewsbury). We reach the city law courts, turn left and cross the main road out out of the city towards the 21st century ring road. This road plows through the old street pattern, cutting across streets that were once tightly packed warrens of low buildings. Standing on the south side of the road, beside the handsome Shakespeare pub, is a section of brick wall, the size of one wall on the average house, with remnants of protruding walls - this is the remains of Bower Spring furnace, a cementation furnace dating from the mid-19th century. Cementation furnaces were once sight that dotted the city, all making steel from bars of iron baked with charcoal.

 

Steel is iron alloyed with carbon and has been smelted across the world for millennia in small furnaces, but the cementation furnace was a leap forward when it was invented in the early 17th century. "Blister steel" as its product was known, was made by baking ingots of "pig iron" (bars run off from a furnace appearing like a sow with piglets) in sealed stone packages with layers of charcoal dust between the ingots. The production process in the cone took time - several days for one cycle of heating and at the end another week of cooling before the finished steel could be removed.

 

Clearly it was a costly and time-consuming process - hence the size and numbers of the Sheffield furnaces. Manufacturers wanted to get as much product from a load as possible. The complexity of the process also explains why in the 18th century the city could build on its pre-existing reputation for metalworking, built up in the previous centuries. There was a big pool of skilled steel makers and, in the days before the chemistry of metallurgy was fully understood and known, the method of the strange alchemy to make steel that could make a world class blade was very lucrative knowledge indeed. Now all that is left of this process that set the cities steel industry on a rapid upward trend is this fragment, and a complete survivor from the mid-19th century. To see the complete furnace we need to walk left down the road for a few minutes to the large Shalesmoor roundabout and detour down Doncaster St. (Slightly further afield a similar cone used for glass making stands in Catcliffe, Rotherham.). Blister steel put Sheffield on the world map as the world centre of steel production and solidified its domination of cutlery making, but it would take another revolution to make the industry spread out to cover the whole of the Don Valley with giant factories.

 

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Crossing the road from Bower Spring takes us into Kelham Island. Now a hip up and coming area of new flats, trendy bistros and real ale pubs, until the 2010s the area was more known for the derelict shells of closed factories and for being a red light district. The shape of the Island dates back to the beginnings of the city. The Don runs down one side and is split at a large weir. The rivers of Sheffield are largely unnavigable to boats because they are regularly dammed by these artificial cascades built long ago to provide heads of water to wheels and control the water flow.

 

The route we will take through the Don Valley will criss cross over, and follow parts of, the city's Five Weirs Walk - a scenic pathway through the green space around the riverbanks. Though with a little extension it can easily become the Seven Weirs walk if the Kelham weir, and another weir about half a mile upriver are included. This second weir is now somewhat isolated, overlooked by very little but walls, vegetation, and a large warehouse advertising itself as an attraction called "Medieval Mayhem", but until the 1970s it sat at the foot of a residential district. The hill of Parkwood Springs once contained rows of back to back housing, pubs and corner shops. All is gone now, though the road layouts remain they are home to low industrial units and empty spaces. The residents and tenants of the razed houses were all moved to 'modern' flats. Just about the only obvious evidence left of past times is the derelict shell of the Fairfield Inn pub next to the river.  A huge gasworks that once dominated several blocks of river side streets is but a memory.

 

Downriver the forces of regeneration have been working their magic on the Kelham Island area. Crossing Rutland Road, running at right angles to the river, the landscape changes to new build flats, mostly clad in brick-look finish, and some renovated older works bordering the riverbanks. The Kelham Weir is crossed by the Ball Street bridge; a Victorian iron bridge recently renovated and repainted in jolly original colours. The residential building facing the river still bears the legend 'Alfred Beckett & Sons Ltd'. Across the road the Cornish Place Works - a four storey brick and stone lintelled pile - is now flats. Around the corner, back on the main road, the building that was once Globe Works is now office and small business units. A handsome survivor of a long lost age, Globe Works date to 1825, one of the earliest of the great works of the Don Valley, and served as the place of apprenticeship to one of the great industrialists of the mid-19th century - but more of that later.

 

Cornish Place, built by James Dixon and Sons, was once one of the largest cutlery factories in the world. Employing around eight hundred workers it specialised in 'Britannia' metal finishing. Mixing tin, copper, brass and antimony this process of plating produced finished steel cutlery that was almost indistinguishable to silver. Thomas Boulsover's pioneering Sheffield plate, which involved time-consuming melting and rolling, was overhauled by the discovery of electroplating - using electric currents to plate a piece inside a vat of electrolyte. In time nickel replaced copper for an even better finish, and Sheffield works like these were the world leaders.

 

Coming off Ball Street bridge, turning left we will pass a handsome gatehouse with a clock tower, it's relatively compact dimensions and decorative flourishes clearly dating from a very early era in modern industrial times, before brutal functionality became the order of the day. This was the Green Lane works of Hoole and Co, makers of cast iron stoves. This was a boom industry of the early industrial age. With all the new back to back terrace houses packed together open fires were increasingly regulated. A fancy decorated stove became just the thing for the household - and reduced the risk that the neighbourhood would be burnt down. In more recent times the structure has been shored up and the clock restored to working order. Now the empty space of the old works is being turned into a pseudo-housing estate meets flats development the public can walk through the gate again.

 

In the 1600s the town armourer, one Kellam Homer, was running a grinding wheel at the end of the islandthat took his name, with a slight variation in spelling. The weir and the split in the river predated him by centuries, with the original function being to to power a corn mill in medieval times a little further downstream. After Kellam came a silk mill, converted to a cotton mill, and finally a corn mill in the 1860s. The mill kept in production until the mid-1970s and nine piers that once supported it above the river still survive, poking out of the water, providing a useful perch for the local ducks. The culvert used to cool equipment in the Tyzak works on the right until the 1980s, when it finally became purely a decorative addition to the landscape. The tail goit was once open down to the river but became a culvert when Alma street was widened in Victorian times. Before this it was a narrow waterside alley called Cotton Mill Walk. The old sign bearing this name is still on the side of the Fat Cat Pub.

 

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Kelham Island lasted as a major industrial area until the 1990s before finally succumbing to the decline that swept all manufacturing and heavy industry in Britain from the 1950s to the late 1980s. For two hundred years the path of Sheffield and it's steel traced such an unstoppable rise, it is hard to imagine the shock that the makers of all these grand buildings would feel at seeing them now all being turned into apartments and restaurants. But the tale of what happened to once all-powerful Sheffield steel industry is a story for later in our journey. For the time being it is enough to at least be thankful that while the purpose has changed at least many of the old landmarks still stand and their quiet grandeur is being re-purposed for a new age. All the regeneration of Kelham into an inhabited area again has been very recent, a 2010s phenomenon, as evidenced by what is missing - there's no post office, or bus stops, or a park. The Upper Don Trail and Five Weirs Walk brought some wildlife and trees back to the riverbanks, though Kelham is still conspicuously lacking in green space despite the large influx of new residents. Still, at least are some other imposing and grand things to stand under, albeit of an artificial variety.

 

Walking down Alma Street the walls and delivery gates of the one-time Tyzak Works are still standing, retained as a perimeter by the new development. At the end the road opens out - large teeming bucket stands on the corner, once used for pouring molten metal. Further down the cobbled drive stands something even larger. A huge black bucket several storeys tall, suspended on giant legs, with a conical open top. The appearance of being some kind of cross breed between an alien spaceship and Victorian steam ship's boiler set off by the heavy duty cogs and gears on the side. This is not a boiler though, it's a Bessemer Converter. In the same way that air force bases will have an old plane from their squadron at the entrance as a 'gate guardian', showing off the heritage of the base, the Bessemer Converter stands guarding the entrance to the Kelham Island museum. What once was the power station for the city's original trams (another victim of shirt sighted modernisation efforts in the 1950s) is now a collection, store and memorial for the steel industry in Sheffield. And the big black bucket is at the heart of it all; speaking very generally Sheffield and the Don Valley can claim two world changing inventions and the Bessemer process that this converter was built to perform is one of them.

 

You will remember that by the mid-18th century steel was being made in the cementation furnaces all over the city and that while this was lucrative it was creating an expensive and limited product. Steel was clearly superior to iron for industrial uses but because steel could only be smelted in small batches iron still took the lions share when it came to construction. Bridges, ships, railway rails, axles, railings, all were made from iron. This was fine for many uses but as engineers began to find out as their ever-larger bridges and ships began to split apart and disintegrate under stresses, iron had its limits. Casting was not an easy process and was widely unpredictable. Bells, wheels, axles all needed to be consistent casts, avoiding cracks and flaws and that was never guaranteed. Large pieces of iron could involve the combined products of hundreds of charges from furnaces.

 

Henry Bessemer, born in 1813, was an inveterate inventor with many patents. Among other things he worked on embossing and glass working, invented a lookalike gold powder for decorating and an efficient sugar cane juicer. After these successes he came to metal working, and in 1856 unveiled his eponymous process for making steel. This involved blowing air into pig iron in a furnace burning at 3000 degrees celsius. The oxygen oxidised out impurities during the huge air blast. A lining clay or limestone (depending on acid or alkaline and the amount of phosphorus) blew out carbon and impurities as waste slag.

 

As always the building blocks of these ideas had been floating around for centuries, the revolution was much more in the details than the idea itself. Even Bessemer didn't have everything in place at first. It took the introduction of spiegeleisen (or, to translate from the German, 'mirror iron') - a manganese-heavy form of iron - into the mix to create a product that wasn't disappointingly brittle when rolled.

 

In the process the great converter was pre-heated, then charged with molten iron, hence the hinging mounting allowing this to be done horizontally, tilted back up and the air blown through at the halfway level, initiating the process. This was very spectacular as a massive fountain of flames and sparks burst out of the top of the furnace. At the end of the process the big gears were engaged again, and the molten steel poured out from the spout, like some huge kettle. The process took about half an hour. Another obvious advantage of the speed of the conversion was that one converter could be prepared while the other was working, and then the roles could be reversed. The structure of the converter is also important - the casting pit and the opening ladle speeded and automated the process. The giant at Kelham is not from Sheffield. The process was long gone from South Yorkshire by mid-century, but persisted in coastal sites where suitable haematite iron ore was more readily available. This massive thirty-ton example worked until 1974 at Workington in Cumbria. This vat is much larger than the converters of Victorian times, which were more on the scale of a modern transit van.

 

By 1859 the first Bessemer converters were ready to make Bessemer steel in a large new works as the city spread out into the wide-open spaces of the lower Don Valley. "There can be no doubt it will have a material effect in spreading the use of steel" wrote a newspaper report in 1862. No doubt indeed. Early American imports fetched prices of eighty pounds per ton. And others works licensed the idea. By the 1880s there was a tenfold increase in production in twenty years over the older manual methods. Being able to make good quality steel, with its much superior tensile strength over iron, in large quantities, was the starting point for much of the modern world we are surrounded by today. It's probably an exaggeration and huge simplification to say that all the world's skyscrapers, large bridges, railway carriages, and all the other products of steel construction, owe their existence to the industrialists of Sheffield and the Don Valley, but it's not a million miles away from the truth either. Consider the effects of steel on the Victorian railways; steel rails could last for a year rather than two or three months as was the case with iron rails. Steel axles didn't break as easily under stress, greatly reducing one of the main causes of disasters on the rails. Steel wheel tyres made railway engines and carriages much more durable. Rail travel, which had been little more than a glorified stagecoach in many places, became a worldwide phenomenon. Sheffield works rolled out rails for the UK and export. Hundreds of thousands of miles of Sheffield rails spread across Europe and America, along the way converting- so to speak - foreigners to the new process.

 

Opposite the entrance to Kelham Island stands a frontage advertising 'Globe Steel Works' (an extension of the same Globe Works to the one up the road) - the last remnants of a complex that included a grand six storey building that used to stand here. It began in the 1810s as a cotton mill owned by a company called Heathfield. But that enterprise didn't last long. The huge, almost new building was laid idle before becoming the workhouse for eastern Sheffield in 1829. This was the other side of the age. The downside of the ruthless sense of world-conquering destiny meant that

those who were unemployed, destitute, sick and impaired were rounded up and put to work. Conditions were not sympathetic to their plight. Husbands, wives and children were split up. Taking the children away from their parents was thought to give them a better chance than leaving them to learn bad habits from their dissolute forebears. Disease was the big fear. In a world with such poor sanitation a sturdy mill building was thought to be an ideal defence against infectious epidemics such as cholera. The workhouse also let society express its prejudices. Apparently, Cholera was discerning enough to focus its attacks on the "dirty, idle, drunken and disorderly" as a Sheffield newspaper had it. Though in reality only 'dirty' had anything to do with the transfer of disease itself, while the others were the frequent side effects of poverty. In time a hospital and asylum were also built here and were in use until 1881, when a new workhouse was built in the Fir Vale area. In its third incarnation the site became the Globe Works, and it is this sign that still looks out over the road. The original mill finally went after World War Two.

 

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Coming out of Kelham Island we pass a relic of what the world used to look like; the stone arch bridge carrying the ring road over the river and keep walking to what it looks like now. The ring road system built in the early 2000s uses the older bridge, as well as a new structure to create the opposing carriageway. Hidden between the roads is the original foot bridge across the river that predates the road - a narrow iron structure. It is blocked off at one end by the new roads so it serves no purpose other than historic. People once lived along the river here. The little area is still called 'Bridgehouses' - the row of buildings overlooking the river that now ends in the Riverside pub's beer garden, once continued into a small row of houses sat by the footbridge. That small terrace has been completely removed from existence. We cross over the road and join a pedestrian path in the shadow of the glass boxes of the UK Immigration and Border Agency, and, further along, the Irwin Mitchell Solicitors. A new footbridge made from steel and cable crosses the river to Nursery Street, where a large renovated flour mill - Aizlewoods - still stands, alongside the old railway hotel, now the Harlequin pub.

 

This area - called 'Millsands' - used to be a gorge of industry, where the works crowded in on both sides, and a quiet waterfront walk would have been unthinkable. Looking over the fence one can see the tail goit from Kelham Island returning to the river from the wall below. In the 1770s this nascent industrial area was still surrounded by greenery - crofts to one side, and the Duke of Norfolk's nursery and orchard on the other - hence the name 'Nursery Street'. Around the 1820s the Edward Vickers company began casting steel here. Their speciality was steel church bells and gun barrels.  The Vickers name will be recurring later on our walk, but for now all we need to know is that the Millsands area was being outgrown by the 1850s.

 

Bookending this small section of the river is Lady's Bridge, the earliest major bridge across the Don, following the medieval route out of the city to the east. This was once the town of Sheffield's boundary stood and the farmers fields began. Renovated buildings still stretch out over the water on piles here, no longer functioning as works but as more flats. Water rushes down another weir at this point, tunnelling an energetic torrent under Lady's Bridge. This is an eighth weir to add to our extension to the Five Weirs Walk, and it's the nearest to the city centre. We cross the Wicker road, and if it were still standing, we would he inside the castle. If we could jump back in time and climb the walls and we would look out on the river tracking the same course, forking sharply left to head out into the valley to Rotherham, and we also would see the castle grounds extending all the way up the hill to Gleadless.

 

All this requires plenty of imagination. Instead of a picturesque castle ruin, as is so common in many British towns and cities, Sheffield had to make do with what was left being buried under the concrete of the 1960s Castle Market. Once the future of the city, the double deck concrete structure was demolished in the 2010s in favour of a new market further into town. Now the plan is to replace the forlorn empty space with a park around the long-hidden remains of the castle, adding some precious green space to the eastern end of the town centre. The castle remnants have attracted archaeologists throughout the years. Access to what was left used to be through basement doors. Studies gave a reasonable idea of the shape. The keep was by the river, a ditch surrounded the inner sanctum, the outer courtyard extended up Haymarket road to where Fitzalan Square stands now. The roads still follow the edges of the castle grounds. The removal of the market has opened up the remains to much more thorough investigation. Sheffield University have been able to rebuild the castle virtually with CGI.

 

In former times we would clearly see the River Sheaf joining the River Don at this point. Now we have to peer over the railing to see the junction, as the Sheaf flows under the road, and down to Sheffield Station, where it meets the River Porter, again under the ground. Another part of the park plan involves uncovering much of the river from these huge Victorian artificial caverns, partly for aesthetic reasons, but also for alleviating the kind of severe flash floods that inundated this area in 2007, when the old storm drains channelled all the city's rainfall straight into the Don Valley and left the roads in the east end under metres of water. On the left of the river stand the glossy-fronted tiled walls that once belonged to a building called the Royal Exchange have escaped the wrecking ball. Inside were the stables for the Midland Railway's horses, as well as various small businesses. Further around are more 21st century constructions, standing on the site of Dannemora Works, once owned by the well-travelled Henry Seebohm, who used some of his profits to roam as far afield as Siberia and South Africa studying wildlife.

 

Down the road sits the unmistakable sight of the railway arches framing the horizon. Over the main road the handsome Wicker arch spans the gap. The arch was built to hold the Victoria station in 1849. Where now there is one main railway station in the city - the Midland Station- until 1971 there were two. Victoria Station serviced a line to Manchester that ran north and then west across the northern route over the Pennines through the Woodhead pass and a three-mile-long tunnel, a wonder of Victorian engineering. In the 1950s the route was modernised with electrification and a new larger bore Woodhead tunnel. Ten years later the Woodhead route and Victoria station were earmarked for the axe, oddly enough not because of the infamous Beeching report - the great swathe of government cuts that closed thousands of miles of 'unnecessary' and unprofitable rail routes in the new age of cheap cars and motorways - but mostly because the DC electrification was incompatible with the rest of the network and there was another route to Manchester from the Midland Station and the Hope Valley to the south.

 

There is still a railway atop the Wicker arch, but it is a single-track line servicing the steel works north in Stocksbridge. After the works the line has been converted into a cycle track, and periodically murmurs arise of plans to restore the line to full functionality, at least as far as Penistone where another line runs to Huddersfield, or other suggestions call to put the Supertram network on the track bed, though the current route does run parallel for much of the way already. Still, functional or not, the archway does provide an attractive landmark in a city that struggles to show off many really grand historic buildings.

 

Also surviving from the railway era is the Victoria station hotel and its approach - the long slope that was once a carriage drive now serving as a car park. The hotel stands alone at the top of the slope, the station building itself is gone, the only traces of what was here are a wall with bricked up windows, a doorway and a flight of stairs with some of the original station tiles on the wall. Some of the station’s footprint is another car park, but most is fenced off empty space. It's not difficult to imagine the station being at least partly restored, perhaps with trams stopping there. There is a precedent for this kind of renewal, and with a genuinely obsolete form of transport; standing on the top of the old carriage drive looking down at the new ring road section running underneath one can see clearly the Sheffield canal basin and looked at closely the canal flowing under the road.

 

Plans were made in the early 18th century to make the River Don navigable from Rotherham to Doncaster, connecting Sheffield with the River Humber, the docks at Hull and the North Sea. But once that task was completed boats and barges bound for Sheffield still had to stop at the outlying hamlet of Tinsley and the rest of the journey was completed behind horse and cart. The scale of the world has changed over two hundred years. Today Tinsley is barely ten minutes drive from the canal basin. Then four miles was a considerable distance to transport heavy goods by land. The Sheffield and Tinsley canal was authorised for construction in 1815, and completed in 1819. Originally it was slated to take the flattest course through Brightside the influence of the Duke of Norfolk moved it to its current location to make it easier to access his businesses. This meant that the canal needed more locks and more expense. The canal is wide, built to accommodate the large 'Humber keel' barges and sloops, that could carry loads under sail all the way to Hull. Today the canal is purely for leisure and the basin is home to the more familiar narrow boats.

 

The canal basin languished for years in a dilapidated state. It was last used for commercial boating in 1970. Now the old buildings are cleaned and restored as flats and offices. The centrepiece is the old warehouse, standing across the water on iron legs, designed in such a way as to allow cargo to be lowered straight into the barges below. To one side of the basin once stood yet another big rail siding, facing the hotel carriage drive. Now there are two hotels standing on most of the site, but some of the railway arches remain in place, with some small businesses in the archways. Towards the top of the basin two iron bridge supports that once held a railway bridge across the canal stand alone. Presumably it is easier to leave them in place than try to dig them out of the water.

 

Also at the top end is a handsome building, now advertising itself as 'Sheaf Quay'. Facing it, we need to imagine that the modern road flyover right behind is not there, and the stone railway arch behind is narrower, without the later expansions to its width. Now we can more easily picture the Sheaf Works following the north side of the canal, and the aformentioned old building, that was once the head office standing looking across the works. Built in 1823 Greaves Sheaf Works was the largest in the city to date and entirely self-contained. The works were packed with cementation furnaces making the steel that was made into cutlery, knives, and razors on the same site.

 

Behind the canal basin runs the Parkway and the tram on its elevated bridge over the large Park Square roundabout at the foot of the town centre. All of these features are relative newcomers. Mid-20th century Park Square simply did not exist - the road in front of the canal basin stopped at a large market hall and the whole area now occupied by the artificial mound, topped by the tram flyovers was a warren of small works all the way to Midland Station. Back to back terraced housing spread up the hill; all this was swept aside by the Park Hill flats complex in the 1960s. This nationally famous brutalist concrete structure nearly went the way of the housing it replaced. The once futuristic 'streets in the sky' blocks, that did away with the impersonal design of most tower blocks by adding wide promenades in front of the flats, became a rundown crumbling mess, a hive of crime and drug use, before being bought out and restored as unlikely aspirational apartments.

 

Two walking routes snake their way through the Lower Don Valley. From the Canal Basin one can simply follow the tow path of the Tinsley canal all the way to Rotherham, or from the Wicker there is the route of the Five Weirs Walk. The river meanders, and the canal takes a straight path. The two nearly meet three quarters of a mile from the canal basin, and eventually they do meet before they get to Rotherham. Combined, they make an ideal circuit, making for a walk of around six miles, threading through, above and below the heart of the valley, passing through hundreds of years of industrial history.

 

Neither traces the original road between Sheffield and Rotherham. To do this one needs to walk under the Wicker, follow the road down Savile Street, with the river on the right, turn right under the Midland Railway viaduct after half a mile, follow the road down towards Attercliffe and across the river at Washford bridge. The road through the Wicker to Tinsley out to Rotherham had existed since medieval times, but this straight line to Washford bridge was charted in 1806. Fifty years before the road had been turnpiked. These days we are used to our taxes paying for roads but in the 18th century roads were paid for with tolls charged by the landowners. There is still some evidence of the toll bars that once ringed the city. Hunters Bar at the West end of town still has its toll gate on the roundabout, as does the junction at Ringinglow- the last stop before the moors - the turret-like toll house still stands, and many of the more venerable pubs around the city edges were coaching inns. Before the railways and the canals, the turnpike routes were crucial in moving goods, and historians have pointed out that light goods such as scythes and cutlery suited Sheffielders well as they had to be carted over hills and dales by horse and cart to get to market. Most of the modern roads around Sheffield still chart the course of the 18 century turnpikes. These weren't what we would expect to find today. Out on the western moors above the city the Houndkirk moor road running from behind Ringinglow toll house shows the condition such 'roads' were often in; a mix of stone, ruts and mud that was tough enough without adding a loaded cart into the mix.

 

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For this piece we will follow the canal tow path first and return on the river. Starting from the canal basin we pass under the Victoria station approach railway bridge, now sadly rather underused for its great size. A small nook on the right allows access to the evocatively named Blast Lane. Just ahead the tow path runs under the Cadman Street bridge. A plaque tells the passerby that this bridge was built in 1819, making it an original dating from the construction of the canal. Now the road is a barely noticeable connection, mostly inhabited by parked vans. The bridge is small and narrow by modern standards, of course, and its stones are eroded by the countless seasons that have passed since it was new. Now it also has a large pipeline running off one side of it. Not all the sights that grace the canal walk are quite so picturesque as the old road bridges that cross over the towpath. Much is run down and derelict; empty lots, broken glass, tumbling down walls, still blackened as if scorched with a blowtorch. The blackness is, of course, the soot from all the chimneys that once blew clouds of muck all over the buildings. The almost picturesque engravings that survive in the archives almost necessarily downplay the amount of smoke all the chimneys created. To provide a realistic aerial view would have involved scribbling a solid mass of grey smog.

 

After a pleasant half an hour or so walking along the towpath, following the canal as it spears in a straight line down the backs of old workshops, a large, rather shabby railway embankment rises on the left. The line on top is clearly still signalled and functional, but the passer-by is unlikely to see and passing traffic in the middle of the day. This section of line was once the Rotherham extension of the Great Central Railway east from Victoria. As with the line to Manchester it fell into gradual disuse in the 1960s. But, unlike the western route it has been kept as a functioning freight bypass. Like most history of industrial concerns, the timeline of the railways in Sheffield is all a very complicated tangle of mergers, rebranding and changing plans. The very first steam railway into Yorkshire opened in 1840. The North Midland, engineered by George and Robert Stephenson, ran from Derby, Chesterfield, Rotherham and north to Leeds. Quite why the route bypassed Sheffield seems bizarre until we learn that the Stephensons were famously averse to building on gradients. George Stephenson made his name with the pioneering Stockton and Darlington, and then the Liverpool and Manchester, both routes that were fairly flat. Stephenson was also locomotive engineer, and he knew that the engines of the time could not pull much of a train up any kind of hill. The more rolling terrain of Yorkshire clearly was not to his tastes, so he plotted a route that avoided one of the largest towns in the area to stay on the level.

 

In order to connect Sheffield with Rotherham, and the wider world to the east and South, city businessmen commissioned a link from the Wicker to the edge of Rotherham town centre. Both stations are long gone now, though the sites are easy to find - Rotherham's original station site is now the local Post Office distribution building and a minute or two's walk up from the town's football ground. The Sheffield station stood where the large Tesco store stands at the end of Savile Street beyond the Wicker arch.

 

To the west meanwhile, the Woodhead route began as the Sheffield, Ashton-under-Lyne and Manchester Railway. This railway originally terminated at a station at Bridgehouses, adjacent to Kelham Island. When Victoria station and the Wicker arch was built the Bridgehouses station was buried under a huge rail yard atop a huge raised section of bricks and stone. When the ring road was expanded in the 2000s the artificial cliff was pushed back to its current size and sections cut through to make new road layouts. In the 1870s the Midland Railway finally connected with Chesterfield and Sheffield, building the Midland Station and the through route passenger trains follow today. The Sheffield and Rotherham passenger line was amalgamated into the Midland. When it was made redundant for passenger use and became a freight spur to the steelworks the Tesco site was turned into another huge railway yard. (There is still a steep disused tunnel connecting the two yards hidden behind the supermarket).

 

Railways quickly put paid to the era of the canal as primary form of transport in Britain, but the Sheffield canal soldiered on for over a century, even with the appearance of the upstart competitor. There was so much cottage industry in the city centre and down the route of the canal, and these workshops backed straight onto the waterway. Finally the modern world began to catch up with the canal, ironically at the same time that railways too were being usurped by road traffic. Fortunately, the urge to discard the past that once gripped the country in the mid 20th century has abated somewhat in more recent times, and the canal is preserved despite being very lightly used as a waterway compared to when it was used for industry. The railway too is to have a minor renaissance, with new main-line compatible 'Tram-trains' to run from the 1990s Super|Tram line onto the railway at Tinsley and into Rotherham central.

 

Less obvious to the walker on the tow path, looking up at the old railway embankment and bridge, is that at this point they too are standing on a bridge. Or, more specifically, an aqueduct.  There needs to be a bridge here because the main road from Attercliffe to Darnall runs underneath, and was already there, connecting what once was two rural villages, when the canal was built. It must have been a impressive sight in 1819. The narrow, one lane width road and separate pedestrian passageways give away the age of the structure, but it still does the same job as when it was built, though the barges and horses and carts are long gone.

 

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Facing east toward Rotherham if we walk down the path from the tow path to the road and turn left, we head into Attercliffe. At the end of the road there is a handsome white building. Inscribed below a chimney stack is date in metal - 1772. This building was built for Benjamin Huntsman, the metalworker whose innovations would bring Sheffield out of the age when cementation furnaces and blister steel were the only game in town. A Lincolnshire native, Huntsman's first trade was in Doncaster as clock maker. After he moved to Sheffield he invented a process that removed impurities in blister steel and allowed for steel castings to be made. It a major step forward over simply hammering out so-called shear steel bars into blades and tools. The Huntsman process involved building up clay pots - crucibles - packing them with iron and flux, then baking the contents in a sand packed furnace in the ground at 1500 degrees celsius. 

 

Though it sounds straightforward enough, the crucible process was a skilled art, from treading the pot clay to the correct consistency, to building the pots at the right thickness, and most importantly, mixing the batches, and baking them for just the right time and temperature. All this happened long before anyone really studied the process scientifically, let alone before computer machine control. And naturally the process and what materials were involved to make quality steel was a closely guarded secret for those who engaged in it.

 

In western Sheffield the apparatus of the process is preserved at Abbeydale Hamlet, an 18th century works complex, incorporating crucible furnaces, water wheels and grinding stones. Now the beautiful tree-lined valley disguises that this was once a purposeful place - one of many works. And also a dangerous place. The crucible holes are quiet now, but when in use the workers would stand above them and have to lift out a white-hot pot with large tongs, carry the contents over to the mould and pour. They would wear wet sacking as rudimentary protection, and it would be bone dry when that minute was over. Just as visitors made note of the smoke, even in an age filled with smog coated cities, they also noticed the hazards of steel making even when most manual jobs were dangerous. Workers needed to be skilful to make a good product, but also to avoid injury. This was a time when nobody thought much of sending men to dangle racks of knives and forks in huge baths of potassium cyanide to electroplate them, or to expose workers to large amounts of lead when cutting files. A time before the flailing cogs and belts that drove the works from the waterwheel were guarded. The huge tilt hammers can be turned at Abbeydale, but not at the frenzied speed they would once have run. Blade makers had to be very careful not to hammer their hands. But it was those on the grinding wheels who faced one of the worst hazards - 'Grinders disease', now known as silicosis. Cutlery grinding could be done with water to damp down the dust, but 'Dry' grinding was also common, leading to inflamed lungs. And unlike bacteria the body can't cough the fine particles out. The 'Consumption' (aka, tuberculosis) was commonplace in workers. The annual mortality rate ran at 28 per 1000 people in these times, as the population rose, to 65,000 in 1821, and shooting up to 135,000 by the 1850s.

 

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The success of the crucible process made Sheffield pre-eminent in steel manufacture, fed by high quality Swedish, Russian and sometimes even Indian iron imported across the North Sea to the docks at Hull, and then down the rivers to the city. By the time of Huntsman's death there were ten crucible steel manufacturers in the city. This would treble in twenty years, then another one hundred different steel makers would appear in the first half of the 19th century. Almost anyone with money to invest could try it, they just had to advertise for workers with enticing pay packets and men with the knowledge and skills would turn up on the door. In the early Victorian age, Sheffield made half the world's steel - this era made the city's reputation as the 'Steel City' across the world, just as Manchester was known as 'Cottonopolis'. Sheffield had four thousand melting holes by 1870s, and even when the mass production Bessemer came along it did not kill off the crucible. Crucible pots may have been labour intensive and wasteful, with their brief lives of only two or three charges, and the need for burly men to heave them from their pits with tongs, but for making much harder tool

steel - for chisels, drill bits and the like - and thin, malleable wire steel, the pot was still the best way to get a quality end product.

 

Huntsman moved to Attercliffe in 1751, the small village east of the town providing an ideal space to spread out his works. The works are gone now, and little remains, though this pioneering place did last in some form until the 1930s. Huntsman died in 1776, (mere days before the United States Declaration of Independence was signed), and the business passed to his son. Attercliffe high street is a somewhat forlorn place these days, a place to be passed by on the way somewhere else, rather than a hub of a community as it was until the 1970s. There is the feeling of the American country towns left behind by the 21st century. There are still many shops on the main road, though most are niche goods rather than essentials, and there is one small hotel. Only the ground floor of the former John Banner department store (that once rivalled the city centre shops and boasted the first escalator in the city) is occupied. The Adelphi cinema stands, 1920s facade intact, but not much happens inside most of the time. The nearby library does still have a use, but as a business rather than a library. There is a small newer housing estate in the area, next to the tram line, and a steam hammer still stands in memoriam to times past in the centre of the development.

 

Huntsman's grave is still visible across the road from his old works. Until the 1940s it was in the grounds of Attercliffe Christchurch, but that building fell victim to German bombs. The 17th century Attercliffe chapel (built on the site of an older medieval building) still stands nearby. Churches once dotted the valley; firms were keen on religion to keep their workers pious and away from the twin temptations of the public house - drinking and gambling. Though many more people went to church compared to nowadays it wasn't as many as we might imagine. Works had Bible societies to encourage the reading of scripture. Works owners also had to meet the disapproving gaze of the middle classes and clergy who often fretted in public and in print about the dangers of godlessness in their uncouth factory workers. The plethora of churches covered all denominations - the handsome church on Alma Street in Kelham Island was built for the Wesleyans, there was even a 'Zion' Non-Conformist church in Attercliffe, where any morally deficient behaviour, which in those days included just about anything other than working and attending Church was punished by excommunication.

 

There was (and is) a definite east west split in Sheffield, with observers noting that the works owners certainly didn't live down Attercliffe or Darnall way with their employees when there were big houses to be built up on the hills at Broomhill, Sharrow, Ranmoor, Tapton and Endcliffe. Where the trades had begun, beside the flowing Pennine water to the west, were becoming the fashionable places to live, and generally speaking, they still are, with the house prices in Fulwood, Dore or Ecclesall often double that of something similar round the Don in Hillsborough. Wages in Sheffield were good in comparison with many cities, by Victorian standards the workers were treated in a decent enough fashion by employers who often maintained a connection to the factory floor. They were men who had begun there after all, and it wasn't unusual to see the bosses of the firms inspecting the day-to-day activities. Still, the city became a hotbed of trade unionism, and unpleasant scenes could arise when employers were considered to be treating people unfairly.

The 'Sheffield Outrages' were a series of bomb attacks on works by disgruntled workers - one targeted Ibbotson Brothers and their Globe works on Penistone Road. Even such a prominent socialist as Friedrich Engels was moved to write of the workers struggles and conditions in Sheffield. Engels, of course, was the righthand man of Karl Marx. Perhaps it wasn't surprising that the employers didn't ride roughshod over the workforce, lest the 'Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire' became more than just a nickname.

 

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Even though he set the great changes in motion that would transform the area Huntsman would scarcely recognise his surroundings today. The roads follow roughly the same path, albeit much wider. Where there were once fields and small farms there are acres of tarmac and assorted large warehouse-like leisure facilities in the American commercial style filling in where huge works once stood. There is an ice rink, Sheffield Arena, the Centertainment complex and a retail park. From 1991 to 2015 there was also the Don Valley Stadium. Built to host the World Student Games in 1991 (as was the Arena and the Ponds Forge swimming complex opposite the Midland station) it lasted a mere twenty-four years before being razed. The Games themselves were a financial disaster for the city council, who faced the embarrassment of successfully bidding for an event that nobody else was interested in and did not even attract much television coverage. All of this for an outlay of hundreds of millions of pounds and a debt to the city that wouldn't be paid off until well over thirty years later. On the plus side the city was left with some new world class facilities to replace empty rubble filled spaces, but while the Arena and Ponds Forge became successful, the stadium never really got going to it's full potential, and has now been replaced by buildings belonging to the UK Institute of Sport. Long before this the whole area of the stadium was the Brown Bayley's Works, which first came to the area in 1870s, a decade after the Bessemer process brought the first mass production of steel, and best known as a maker of rails and railway axles. Cars parked outside the Cineworld cinema are sat on the former site of a huge rail yard that serviced the works and surrounding area.

 

Nestled in among these at the roadside are the former Attercliffe school, and the 17th century Carbrook Hall. This is one place Huntsman would know - the timber house that once adjoined the stone block has long gone, but there are still Tudor fittings inside even today, though the building itself has now found a new use... as a Starbucks Coffee. The surrounding side roads around the hall have changed utterly in the past few decades. Within living memory this grid of a few blocks was once lined with back to back terraced housing for the steel workers.  Not a trace remains now, the whole area has been re-zoned as light industrial units.

 

Across the main road the path of Broughton Lane heading south, cutting through the middle of the area and over the canal has not changed since the 1800s. The road takes its name from one Spence Broughton. Along with a John Oxley in 1791, he held up a mail coach on Attercliffe common. One of many holdups the highwaymen perpetrated, Broughton was later hanged at York prison (Oxley had managed to escape in the meantime, though it came to naught. Contemporary reports say that he was later found dead up on the moors above Sheffield). Broughton's corpse was publically displayed at the site of his crime for many years. The macabre sight of the gibbet and what was left of Broughton ensured his lasting notoriety. The gibbet was supposed to be a deterrent and warning to other would-be criminals but in reality, it enhanced the romantic outlaw image of the highwaymen and often attracted sympathy for the dead man. Even now the local pub is named the Noose and Gibbet and a life size effigy hangs outside the front.

 

At the meeting of rail and road at Broughton Lane there was a railway station, closed and erased by a wider road bridge. The tow path walk crosses over here, and around the next long lazy corner is the sprawling complex of Tinsley lock. The locks cover a large area but are barely visible from down below in the car parks of Cineworld and an Ikea. These days it is more hidden than it once was thanks to the efforts of tree planters adding some greenery to the landscape. Old overhead photographs of the area show a vista that is a combination of dense industry and barren space, with the banks of the river and canal a bare dusty bank, a long way from many of the green spaces that surround the walking routes today.

 

Tinsley is as far as we go, any further and we are heading into Rotherham. If we want to get a sight of a modern steel mill we can carry on down the river, follow it through Rotherham town centre and around the north of the town until we see the Aldwarke mill, a massive site, still in use as a part of Tata Steel. If we do decide to take an extension in Rotherham we will also see the former Templeborough Steel Works, belonging to British Steel, that closed in 1993. Unlike so many of its contemporaries the huge sheds were spared the bulldozer and turned into 'Magna'. This is one of those slightly nebulous not-quite museum, meets playground, meets conference space that were popular around the turn of the millennium. Think Millennium Dome but darker and more industrial. This illustrates the difficulty with filling the former sites of industry in South Yorkshire; the empty scars are so enormous even big investment can't fill all the spaces. Even today, while the Don Valley has rebounded back with retail and leisure there are still huge gaps in the landscape waiting for development.

 

A few miles away the infamous Orgreave coking plant, forever remembered as the site of clashes between police and striking miners is now a housing estate development, with room for a whole new suburb's worth of homes. Ironically the Sheffield city airport, built next door was not really big enough for most commercial uses and has ceded to the Robin Hood Airport on the former RAF Finningley near Doncaster. Happily, Magna has escaped these sad ends and continues to loom menacingly over the road to Rotherham, giving this much downtrodden part of the world something to smile about.

 

Pride of place around here is the shopping mall that has taken over the eastern end of Sheffield and is impossible to miss from Tinsley – Meadowhall. Meadowhall has become such a dominant feature of local life that it is nearly impossible to imagine a time when it was not there. If Sheffield's relatively small city centre was sent against the ropes by the opening of the huge shopping mall in 1990 (Cole Brothers (now a John Lewis) is just about the only major outfit in the city that does not have a larger counterpart at or around Meadowhall), then Rotherham was knocked to the

canvas. If the slap in the face that Sheffield's neighbour received from the collapse of mass steel manufacture in the 1980s was bad enough then it then had to watch as the replacements - all the American style box stores - left it's town centre a ghost town. Amazingly the town still hangs in there despite there being yet another retail park at Parkgate at the canal-side on the eastern side of the town.

 

Shopping has now become the dominant activity at the far eastern end of the city, followed closely by queuing in traffic. The once majestic double deck M1 motorway flyover, intended to keep passing north-south traffic flowing, is a car park two times a day. For much of its life this viaduct was overshadowed by two 1930s power station cooling towers - even outsiders to the area knew that Sheffield was signalled by its cooling towers, even long after they were decommissioned and left empty. The old power station, the river and the Blackburn Meadows sewage treatment plant occupied most of the room between the M1 and Rotherham, thus completely blocking any major roads being built to connect the two. In 2008 the towers were removed - the cost of upkeep for the redundant structures deemed excessive. The implosion was greeted by great public sadness in the local media - though considering nearly everything else of comparable age around the area has also gone, if it was a genuine concern for industrial history rather than just a sentimental gesture it was a bit late. Nothing has replaced the towers as of yet - rumoured plans for an Angel of the North style statue are in limbo.

 

Aldwarke steel works is the exception rather than the rule. It is eye catching to see it today; huge, covering acres, still humming. Until 1982 the entire site now covered by Meadowhall was just the same species of works, like a great forbidding fortress filling the whole valley from river to canal. And just like Sheffield Castle there is virtually nothing left of this citadel either. In this part of the world any time before the late 1980s might as well be a different epoch given the enormous alterations to the landscape, workplaces, lifestyles and politics. Though it was the era of punk rock, disco, Star Wars and Space Invaders, the pictures of miles of still smoking chimneys and of a great mass of striking workers outside the Meadowhall works gates in 1980 are so unimaginable to younger people today they might as well be engravings from  the 1800s. The mall itself has a large double scale sculpture of three workers teeming a crucible outside one if it's entrances. Something for children to pose in front of for their mums but most of the people passing barely spare a glance. After all even many of the parents now weren't born when Meadowhall opened.

 

The name that once stood over the railway in large red lettering was that of Hadfields, the firm that brought many innovations to the world of steel. Robert Hadfield senior founded a foundry in Attercliffe in the mid-19th century. After a few successful years Hadfield built the huge (for the time) Hecla Works by the river side just north of Attercliffe. His son Robert Junior joined straight out of school in the late 1870s, aged only in his mid-twenties. He was soon experimenting with different alloys of steel, making a breakthrough with the discovery that the addition of manganese at thirteen per cent created an alloy that was very tough yet malleable. It could be worked easily, making it very good alloy for much superior rails as well as mining machines and other equipment that needed hardened teeth. Later incarnations would of Hadfield's steel would get ever tougher the more they were worked, an extraordinary innovation. Instead of ripping up tracks every year for replacement, as was the standard of the era, the Sheffield tramway corporation tracks would last a decade's use.

 

Hadfields brought science and proper experimentation into the craft world of steel. He recorded literally hundreds of different alloys and their properties. Ten years after manganese steel, Hadfields introduced silicon steel. This was the steel that made major electrical grid networks possible. Others followed Hadfield's lead in establishing their own metalworking laboratories, as did the newly formed Sheffield University. In 1897 the company started its massive new East Hecla works on the Meadowhall site. Such huge works were needed for the creation of massive steel castings. Where once the largest works of the city had been creating scythes and railway axles by forging using water-powered tilt hammers, steel casting allowed the production of such giant articles as huge cranks for ship's engines, hydraulic cylinders, and artillery shells. For all its vast acreage Meadowhall still sits surrounded by large pockets of empty space, testament to the vast scale of the works that once were.

 

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Surrounding Meadowhall are a few scattered remains of the past. On the north side is the fifth of the five weirs, and the old Hadfields entrance, a girder bridge across the river that once took workers into the works. Take a diversion slightly up the hill at Jenkin Road to look down on the former Brightside station on the current Midland mainline. The station platforms are almost intact. The station closed and effectively moved a few hundred metres down the tracks to Meadowhall interchange, where it can link up with a bus station and the tram much more easily. Further round the perimeter road a side junction takes the newer Meadowhall Road into a prominent dip through a bank. This was once yet another railway connection in the valley, this one built in 1901 as a spur across to Catcliffe and Treeton in Rotherham, with the path following where the rails connected into Hadfields. It is the same line whos disused bridge crosses the canal at Tinsley locks.

 

Take Meadowhall Road along and turn right to join the Five Weirs Walk as it comes over the road from the trees on the right. At the end of the crescent of Weedon Street is a more obvious sign of the railway; a large truss bridge crossing both the main road and river. At this point we are standing on an ancient route across the river. In maps dating back centuries there is a river crossing here. These days Weedon Street sits amid empty lots, waiting for a purpose greater than overspill parking for Meadowhall. Once it was surrounded by works. On the east side was a rolling mill, and one of the city tram garages (the latter is still there at the far end). The west side skirted around the venerable Brightside Works of William Jessop and Sons. Jessops began in the city centre in the 18th century and expanded out to the lower Don Valley with the coming of the crucible process. At Brightside weir there were water wheels in the 17th century, powering a cutler and a corn mill that dated back to medieval times. When acquired by Jessops in the 1850s the site briefly became the largest steel maker in the world. Over one hundred crucible pits were crowded in among the furnace chimneys. When they were replaced the old tilt hammers of Jessops found their way to Abbeydale Hamlet, where they are still visible to see, guarding the gate. 

 

Brightside works have been completely erased. The only trace of them is a modern commemoration across the river, at the edge of a car park in a modern business park. A crucible pot pours steel frozen in time, framing the distant dome of Meadowhall. Jessops is gone too, merged away in the 1960s, though the name lives on in the Jessop maternity hospital in the city, the Victorian original having been partially funded by the company.

 

At this point we have a choice; we can follow the five Weirs Walk along the river or take the road through the middle of the heaviest steel industry that remains in Sheffield and that has ever been in the area. The river route is more picturesque, while the road route is more consequential. The weir at Brightside shows evidence of efforts to help reintroduce some wildlife to the river. All the weirs now have the feature seen most clearly here, as the side of the weir has been reconstructed with a 'fish pass', a free-flowing channel designed to allow salmon, trout and the like to swim further upstream. It almost goes without saying that deep in the 19th century the river was not amenable to any kind of wildlife, though the tropical water temperature created by the outflow from all the works did lead to some bizarre fauna appearing - fig trees, for example, thrived in the banks.

 

Standing at the end of Brightside Lane it is impossible to miss the two sheds of Sheffield Forgemasters surrounding the road. Once upon a time most of the Lower Don Valley looked Just like this. The canyons of industry, a road cutting through darkened cliffs of the great works sheds, at the height of the area's powers - nothing about steel making by the turn of the 20th century could be considered small or subtle. But the huge scale of these black Victorian sheds is also a clue to how and why they are one of the few survivors into the modern age. The seeds of the problems that came to a head in the 1980s dated back decades, even far into the 19th century. Sheffield only briefly held the undisputed title of the world's foremost steel producer before other countries caught up.

 

By the 1890s the steel boom had slackened, a victim of it's own success - the railway rails were laid, the bridges built, their components lasted and the demand for new material ebbed. Sheffield was inland, and far from iron suppliers compared to North East, or Wales, or London, where there was also home to increasingly competitive steel works. Half a century before, Sheffield been supplying the Americans the building blocks of their industry. Now the Americans were making their own steel, with a huge domestic market opening up, and were placing tariffs on any imports from abroad. Bulk steel was already on the way out almost entirely by the 1890s. Sheffield was surviving by specialising, though that did not mean that the scale of operations would be reduced. Quite the opposite in fact.

 

The Don Works sheds now occupied by Forgemasters began life under the name of Vickers engineering. This was the same Vickers that made steel bells by the river at Millsands. Vickers was once one of the dominant names of British heavy industry - making many acquisitions around Britain they built ships, trains, and eventually cars and aeroplanes. River Don works began in 1864, the largest steel works in the world. Though the river was no longer needed for power it was still used; water was pumped into reservoirs for coolant and for operating hydraulic cranes, enormous presses and steam hammers. This was a new era of huge equipment for huge products - axles, ship cranks, propellers, boilers, and then in time, jet engine blades, oil rig parts, and nuclear reactor vessels

 

The opening of the Vickers works coincided with the worst disaster ever to visit the city, and one of the worst in the country. In 1864 the Dale Dike dam was nearing completion overlooking the valley of the Loxley. At 95 feet tall the artificial bank was the latest in Victorian engineering - theoretically at least. The reservoir was built to satisfy the demand for water in the city, up until then had been  a makeshift affair (the name 'Barkers Pool' for one of the city's largest squares is a legacy of one of the small water reservoirs that had previously been one of the sources of water). Whipped by the winds and rains from the west over the Pennines the bank split and crumbled one March evening, causing immense devastation downstream.

 

The death toll was counted in the following days as two hundred and thirty eight. People either washed away or smashed by disintegrating timbers and debris. The physical damage was immense in the areas surrounding the river. Those least fortunate were those working late in the forges and mills, and those in the terraces nearest the water. At one end of a row of housing everyone could be safe, and the other entire families were wiped out. In the heart of Hillsborough crossroads the water scoured clear the banks. Most bridges were washed away. At Kelham Island the water flooded the workhouse's bottom floors. The huge building was used as a morgue in the aftermath. The Wicker became a churning torrent, destroying business and some lives. As far away as the new Don Works the rising waters caused damage and even one death of a worker. The dam collapse still counts as one of Britain's worst peacetime losses of life, but few in the wider world have heard of the disaster now. It happened shortly into the age of photography, and the pictures were seen all over the country at the time. Doubtless the historical amnesia would not been the case had the calamity demolished the homes of, say, Chelsea or Westminster, rather thanks the workshops of North East Sheffield. Even in the city there isn't a great deal of obvious commemoration. At Kelham the Fat Cat pub building dates from the 1850s and a marker on the side records both the level of the Dale Dike flood and the inundation of 2007. The latter is a mere puddle compared to the height the flood waters of 1864. The dam was rebuilt, and further reservoirs added downstream. They have all done their jobs impeccably since Victorian times.

 

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If it wasn't for specialised steels, and the products made from them, the whole industry could have become a footnote before the end of the Victorian era. But that did not mean it was to be an industry that would have a solid future. Sadly as the early decades of the 20th century ticked by the same misplaced confidence and complacency that affected British industry and its management - that feeling that because Britain invented this heavy industry business and had exported and built so much of the modern world, it would always be on top - also had an influence on Sheffield steel just as much as anywhere else.

 

The problem with Sheffield was a familiar one that many British industries found themselves with. There were far too many different steel companies, many of them competing with each other rather than foreign firms. There were not quality problems with Sheffield's product - it was as renowned as ever, but with such huge forges and mills as had appeared by the 1920s the market was getting saturated. All the innovations that the great Sheffield steel masters had come up with were becoming easily emulated, and sometimes bettered by others. Mergers followed mergers followed acquisitions and buyouts in Sheffield. The mighty Firth and John Brown companies became Firth Browns in 1902. Hadfields, Brown Bayley and the Huntsman name were under the same joint ownership by the 1960. The Bessemer company was bought by a Rotherham firm, John Baker. Vickers steel became English Steel, and then, in 1967 British Steel as many steel works were nationalised.

 

By the 1980s employment in the steel industry had slipped from 40,000 to 13,000 in a single generation. There were seven hundred cutlery firms in 1950, employing 15,000 people. By 1990 the number was ten firms with about a thousand workers. The great domino collapse began. Hadfield's East Hecla works was gone in 1982. Atlas Works and Brown Bayleys went in 1983, Templeborough ten years later. Down in Kelham Island the Cornish works made it's last cutlery in 1992. Tool manufacture continued behind the elegant gates of Green Lane Works until 2007. The large sheds of Tinsley Wire also fell silent in 2007. Even some of the city's other prominent works also suffered. In 1990 there were four large breweries in the city limits. By 2000 there were none, with the tiny Kelham Island brewers belonging to the Fat Cat pub being the largest one left. By the end of the 1980s half the available space in the Don Valley that was once occupied by works was barren. The mighty River Don works would have gone the same way but for the merging the Firth Brown company with the old Vickers British Steel buildings to create Forgemasters.

 

Despite outside appearances it wasn't all downhill in the 20th century for Sheffield steel. Crucibles were finally finished by the electric arc furnace, a continental European invention. 1910 was the first year the big names of Sheffield tried the new electric technology. Another invention was imported from the mills of Pennsylvania, USA - though in spirit it was a British innovation originally. One Robert Mushet had been the overlooked second party in the Bessemer process. He was a Gloucestershire steel maker and introduced the spiegeleisen so crucial to preventing a uselessly brittle end product. Mushet had also been experimenting with hardened steel. Mushet's steel alloy combined carbon, manganese and tungsten. American experiments in the Bethlehem PA company around the turn of the century swapped out the manganese for chromium - most well known as a decorative metal. Another form added the more obscure element vanadium (one that not many people have heard of but is surprisingly abundant on Earth). Had history been just, Mushet should have been one of the most famous innovators of the age. As it was he fell into the background, the glory taken by others. Eventually decorum, guilt, or social pressure compelled Bessemer to pay Mushet a decent pension in his twilight years.

 

These new steels were called "high speed steel". This name had nothing to do with express trains or anything like that, but to do with the high speed such steel could tolerate when used as a cutting edge. Though less famed in local lore than the Bessemer process, high speed steel made for another worldwide revolution, but this time in the more prosaic, if just as vital world of machine tools.

 

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The Five Weirs Walk takes a detour away from the river now, as Forgemasters is in the way occupying both banks of the river, and passes close to Carbrook Hall, around the main road and the Wentworth House pub before swinging back down Hawke Street- one of those older Victorian roads that was widened in the 90s - and rejoining the river. Hawke Street carries on becoming Upwell Street, under yet another old railway yard and gasworks site, now an Amazon distribution centre. The riverside path switches sides over a new humpbacked footbridge, with some of those 'cyclists dismount' signs that are usually disregarded by everyone who passes, and continues with a long straight section behind the most thoroughly refurbished and densely regenerated area of the valley, packed in tight with new warehouses and offices.

 

At Newhall Road the path swaps sides again using the recently refurbished road bridge. On the corner here was once the original Hadfields Hecla Works, the 1849 predecessor to the larger works at Meadowhall. Straight up Newhall Road to the left would take us back to Attercliffe and behind the Hecla site is the Attercliffe cemetery that once belonged to the lost church. The 'Cliffe' of the name was once a real cliff – not scaling great heights - but enough of a feature to inspire a name. When Benjamin Huntsman was laid to rest in the church graveyard the cliffs were clearly visible on the next bend of the river coming up. This is one of the more dramatic vistas of the river, as it sweeps around a large ninety-degree corner inside a big brick lined canyon with the path on the top edge. This whole embankment is a construct of the 1880s to expand the Hecla Works site. Now it holds up an Outo Kumpo wire mill, towering over the entire block, and humming with purpose.

 

Originally the river ran a much wider turn underneath all the concrete and in fill. All of these aging brick walls on the outside of the river are a bit of headache for the council, as the river is very good at scouring them away. The flooding of 2007 was especially destructive; pulling down large segments of brickwork like the icing on the side of a cake. On the north side of the river once stood Attercliffe Nether Forge, one of two iron forges built around this corner of the river in the late 16th century and owned by George Talbot, the Sixth Earl of Shrewsbury, and the man in charge of Hallamshire, Ecclesfield, Rotherham and Sheffield manors. Probably the richest person in the land outside of royalty. One of the first industrialists, owning most of the Sheffield steel and iron forges and the coal mines that supplied them. To top it off he was married to the formidable Bess of Hardwick, the creator of the enormous Hardwick Hall, still there a few miles down the motorway south of Meadowhall. Aside from their stately home, the family's most famous role in history was as the custodian of Mary Queen of Scots throughout the 1570s. The Manor estates in Sheffield take

their name from the Tudor Shrewsbury manor where the errant Catholic royal relative was kept under house arrest, (after a spell in the Castle)

 

At this great remove it is a little difficult to picture the scene as it was for several centuries. "An extensive pile of smoky brick buildings", as a contemporary railway guide describes it (just before the scene changed radically), the mill would have stood in among fields, the smoke of the city several miles distant down the rough roads by pack horse. A long head goit was built out north from the river further upstream running through the fields. On the other side was a second head goit for a slitting mill (a mill making long rods of iron for nails and the like) at the other end of the long river curve. By the 1810s the straight goit was all filled in, but the Upper Forge goit remained in use long after the fields became cobbled works yards. The arched outflow channels from the mill are still there to be seen peering out from the stones.

 

Nearby, halfway along New Hall road was the titular Hall, a grand private house, stately among the fields. After the end of the age of the Dukes of Shrewsbury the ownership of the forges passed to various owners over time before settling an iron master previously of the rural Wortley Forge, north of the city (and preserved to this day), John Fell. The New Hall was built by his son, also a John. Only the road name survives today. Newhall Road bridge has a wide span as it was built in anticipation that the area north of the river would become a new port for the city, with the Don downstream being turned into a ship canal like the Manchester Ship Canal. That plan never came to pass. The site became another large works - Sandersons, a company dating back to the 18th century. Sandersons apprenticed the Firth brothers among others (their father was a foreman at Sandersons). Their main works were further afield at Darnall, down the road from the old canal aqueduct.

 

The path crosses Stevenson Road - a wide but lightly trafficked road, criss-crossed by quickly moving vans and trucks taking advantage of the diagonal shortcut if offers from Attercliffe to Brightside. Taking a detour right up the barren wastes of Newhall - Sandersons is gone, it's another empty space awaiting a buyer - allows the walker or cyclist to peer over a wall and see the long-disused head goit, probably the most forgotten and secluded area in the whole valley, even though it is smack next door to the railway. Heading back towards the city the river bends left, the banks build up, and the trees thicken for a section, almost becoming like walking through woods, until another weir emerges, Sandersons weir.

 

Every few minutes the railway rattles as a train passes on the Midland viaduct, a mile stretch of bricks that reaches all the way back to Attercliffe road station. MC Escher-like figures painted by local artist 'Phlegm' on the black bricks (part of a series all over the city) are now smeared over by the more usual witless graffiti tags that find their way to even the hardest to reach spots. Despite being surrounded by artificial construction Sandersons weir manages to be than most bucolic of the Don Weirs, tucked away as it is away from the passing traffic. The path crosses East Coast Road and again changes sides on the river. The next segment is the only part of the walk that is closed overnight behind gates, presumably because it runs up behind the back of occupied office buildings. If we take a detour right on East Coast Road we run under the railway and find the works building of Gripple fasteners, with it's signature metal spider clinging to the side of the entrance. It's not the largest metal creature in the area, as Forgemasters have a car-sized metal scorpion squatting by their main entrance.

 

Savile Street runs back to the Wicker and is one of the two main thoroughfares in the heart of what once was the densest collection of industry in the city. The other main road is the parallel Carlisle Street another block further north. Most of the great names (or, more precisely, what would become the great names) of Sheffield steel gathered around this area when the Sheffield to Rotherham railway was completed in 1839. On its own the railway didn't immediately lead to great industry - for several years it was not heaving with traffic and goods. If we could somehow take a ride along it when it was opened it would be nearly all through fields and trees. Considering the pace of the locomotives of the age (40mph tops) and the mostly open carriages it would be an experience considered quite leisurely and relaxing to modern sensibilities - unless it was pouring with rain or the wind was blowing the hot cinders from the engine in our faces. Eventually the combination of the railway with the large flat empty spaces and the small confines of the city centre would lead to massive new factories.

 

There is no railway anymore, but walking north from Savile to Carlisle streets, into the heroically named Atlas district, takes us over a clue to where the track once ran. East Coast Road becomes Carwood Road and rises up on a box bridge over the road underneath. Looking over the edge we can see a business park below. Take another detour and walk around to the business park and the bridge becomes very clear. This, of course, was originally built over the Rotherham Sheffield railway - though by that time it had been merged into the Midland Railway. The newer roads follow the line of the track under several more road bridges. The spur originally connected at Carbrook and the attentive train passenger can see where the arches are still much wider to accommodate the former junction.

 

Back on the five Weirs Walk the river curves around under Washford bridge. To the right was once the site of Royds Mills, another 16th century water powered mill that was swept aside and buried under the later works. We are now back at where river and canal are almost side by side. The trees thicken - this is now the Salmon Pastures nature reserve, once a slag and cinder heap, now regrown with trees and restored partly to how it must have been in pre-industrial times. Around the end of this section is the Burton weir. The railway and road overlook this weir; it feels nearer the city. The route continues out onto the road - turning the opposite direction and following the railway arches up Princess Street takes us up to the last of the steelmaking milestones that belong to the area. On the right of the road is a three-storey brick building, built in an early 1900s proto-art deco style, as if it was designed with Lego bricks. Long ago the roof was emblazoned with "BROWN-FIRTH RESEARCH". This is why this unprepossessing building is preserved because it was once research and development offices and is the birthplace of stainless steel.

 

That steel and iron rusts was a fact of life for millennia. Eventually over time even the finest of the products of 19th century steelmakers would corrode when exposed to the elements. This patently is not the case anymore - the man who bridged the difference between cutlery that turned orange and flaky and today's knives and forks was Harry Brearley. Brearley, born in Sheffield in 1871, had his first acquaintance with industry as an errand boy in a crucible workshop. As an adult he spent some time working for Firths in Russia (specifically in Riga, now in Latvia) and had returned home in high esteem to work in the combined research laboratories of Firth and Brown. Such esteem that, as a thirtysomething, he negotiated that any patents that came of his work would he shared between himself and the company.

 

Sheffield folk will tell you that Brearley invented stainless steel - like almost all inventions the truth is a little more complicated. Many 19th century metallurgists were at least aware of the process of adding chromium to steel and the effect this would have on its durability. Brearley like other researchers was following in the footsteps of Attercliffe born Henry Sorby, the pioneering Sheffield microscopy researcher – the 'Father of Metallography' - who's efforts with the microscope had paved the way for many of the great breakthroughs of the metal working trade. Though the local steel was only one of his subjects of study - biology and geology took up most of his time, including the interestingly named problem of 'slatey cleavage' (ie; why the layers of slates and similar rocks split the way they do).

 

A century and a half earlier Thomas Boulsouver had discovered his Sheffield Plate by accident - leaving cutlery in his forge too long melted the copper and silver together creating his Sheffield Plate. And, like many other laboratory discoveries of the age of industrial invention- vulcanised rubber, penicillin, bakelite, Teflon, Stainless steel was accidentally stumbled upon by an inspired tinkerer in the field, methodically working through combinations of ingredients before hitting the chemical jackpot. Firths were one of the world's leading munitions manufacturers, and one problem that was being worked on in the research laboratories was how to make gun barrels more durable. In the course of working on the gun barrel problem, Brearley had a revelation with one of his test ingots - to be precise one that was composed of 12.8% chromium, 0.24% carbon, 0.44% manganese and 0.20% silicon. To study their test ingots under the microscope, it was usual practice following Sorby's principles to etch into the surface to reveal the layers of the metal. In passing Brearley noted that on this one particular batch the etching was not damaged by any of his usual acids. This seemed to be steel that was resistant to tarnishing.

 

Brearley was the right man, in the right time, but he was undoubtedly in the right place too. This was where working for an industrial powerhouse came in handy. Across the Atlantic an American industrialist and prolific innovator called Elwood Haynes also conjured up a similar alloy around the same time and had a vision of selling stainless steel to everyone. In a rare moment of cooperatation in the cutthroat history of invention Haynes and Brearley founded a joint company to make stainless steel.in America, but Haynes sold up a few years later - leaving Brearley's name synonymous with the innovation, even though he resigned from Firth Brown in 1916 over patent disputes and defected to Brown, Bayley & Dixon. Much of the work that went into developing stainless steel into products was done by his successor W.H. Hatfield.

 

The earliest stainless products tested the waters - Vickers advertised stainless golf club heads, razors and table knives in their first catalogue. The public gradually caught on and the Sheffield firms gained in confidence. Soon Hatfield's '18/8' steel formula (with nickel added to the mix) was being marketed by Firths as 'Staybrite' and turned into everything one could want for the home - complete cutlery ranges, kitchen knives, dinner sets, and an obvious place for rust proofing; bathroom fittings. As always there was a huge market for things traditionally made with precious metals - watches were especially popular. Not only did the Depression of the 1930s slash the demand for silver watches, but also made such overt flaunting of wealth a social no-no in many places. One exception where stainless was used to shamelessly show off was at the Savoy Hotel in London where a stainless steel entrance facade was unveiled in 1929. Also in London, less flashy but also influential, the supporting columns and the great dome of St Paul's Cathedral were reinforced with

stainless bracing.

 

The effect on industrial design was profound. In the 1920s and 30s "styling" was a novel idea. Products and gadgets were still functional objects. Twenty years after Brearley's first experiments designers were in the grip of the Art deco era - the aesthetic of clean surfaces and distinct lines would have been much less striking to behold without stainless steel. The most famous design flourish of the age - the 'hubcap' pinnacle of the Chrysler Building in New York - has symbolised modernism with the aid of its seven storeys of stainless cladding since 1929.

 

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This is the home stretch now. We can walk back along Savile street - now little remains of what once was down here. Most of the lots are car dealerships, taking advantage of the large flat spaces. At the meeting point of Saville street and Attercliffe Road stands a brick office ("12 O'Clock Court") styled to look like an old works, complete with clock tower and courtyard. It’s not bad, but it's not fooling anybody. The preserved drop hammer nearby that announces the entry to Brightside to drivers heading out towards Meadowhall and the M1 is more authentic.

 

A few blocks further north at the junction of Carlisle and Sutherland Streets the walls close in and large sheds surround the road again. This corner was once the early epicentre of Victorian steel production. Paintings and engravings capture the scene around this point as the fields are invaded by the railway and chimney stacks. The man who made much of it happen - Henry Bessemer - had his office a few yards from the junction and it still stands. Only a few windows wide but tall and stout, with heavy stone lintels and a front door of industrial dimensions it stands as a quiet memorial to a once great past. Bessemer's works here were opened in 1858, making him a relative latecomer to expansion into the lower valley. It took a few years for Bessemer to convince. He was from Hertfordshire originally, and spent much of his time at workshops in St Pancras London. He was an outsider and Sheffield tradesmen were a conservative lot (unsurprisingly given their century of success). The processes' shaky start before the intervention of Mushet's spiegeleisen meant that the company had already refunded some unimpressed licensees, hardly a way to convince.

 

Bessemers next door neighbour was the company of John Brown, which had its beginnings in the city 1837, at the site of the present day Orchard Square shopping centre (Brown was the uncle of George Brown one of the founders of Brown Bayley Dixon, the former occupants of the Don Valley Stadium site). Brown, a local, patented spring-loaded steel railway carriage buffers. Not much of an invention we might think today, but the buffers stopped coaches in the early trains banging harshly together and made faster trains easier to run. The success of that product allowed Brown's to build it's Atlas Works in 1855, a new single site works in the lower Don. As well as picking up the Bessemer process from his neighbour, another process the three thousand men and boys working there used was the a relatively crude method called 'puddling'. This created economical lower quality steel that could be rolled into thick metal armour plating. Rolled armour was the new thing for Navy ships. The first 'iron clads' were a Victorian invention, followed by huge steam 'Dreadnoughts' - the first of a new breed of heavy Battleships. As other firms came to forge shells for artillery there came to be productive neighbourly rivalries between the forgers of armaments and armour.

 

Firth Brothers and their Norfolk Works opened in 1852, Brown's Atlas Works three years later. Charles Cammel built the Cyclops Works in 1846. Cammell born in Hull but apprenticed in the Globe Works on Penistone Road. He was hugely successful but took little interest in public affairs. Hence why the name is not such a feature of Sheffield nomenclature and history in the same way as some others. John Brown, William Jessop, and Mark Firth were all the Master Cutler (the head of the cutler's guild) and the Mayor. Brown became the mayor in 1861 and Jessop succeeded him, Mark Firth took the position a decade later, and built houses, a college bearing his name, as well as the Firth Norfolk Works on Savile Street in 1855. Mark and his brother (and business partner) Thomas were the toasts of the town, hobnobbing with the likes of the Prince of Wales and John Ruskin. A Royal visit in 1875 saw the roads of the Wicker and the lower Don lined with buntings, and decorated arches and most of the populace lined the roads. Since they couldn't give away armour plates, pistons or train wheels the VIPs were lavished with the finest cutlery, knives and guns.

 

By the late 1980s, such a scene along Carlisle and Savile streets would have been unimaginable. The grand old office building looked out on a world of desolation, with countless emptied lots, bare patches of concrete, broken windows and orphaned brick walls. Where once there were thousands of cloth capped workers flooding in every day to work in the foundries and rolling mills. The jobs were myriad; tilt hammers, cranes, furnaces, rollers, steam engines... Even up until the 1970s one part of armour plate rolling involved carrying armfuls of branches and tossing them onto the molten rolling sheets. It was hot, dangerous, backbreaking work, but it was work and almost to a man the workers were proud of what they did and enjoyed the camaraderie of the factory floor. When it all went away the social damage inflicted on the area was just as bad as the physical. Hundreds of houses have gone since the 1950s - there is no need to live in Attercliffe, Carbrook, Atlas, and Brightside, if there is no work.

 

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Thankfully even as the terrible damage caused by the collapse of steel was being inflicted there were concerned parties trying to mollify the effects. The Sheffield Development Corporation was set up in 1988 and it's programs of regeneration did fill in some of the gaps in the landscape (cleaning up the Canal Basin was an early project). Nowadays workers from elsewhere clog the roads commuting into the valley to the business parks but at least they are coming again. Compared to the dark days of the 1980s and early 1990s there is a noticeable increase in activity. Cross the middle of the valley on Brightside Lane, and it is nearly filled with businesses again.

 

If we stay on the Five Weirs Walk we pass down the back of buildings to a truss footbridge across the river. This is a Bailey Bridge - one of thousands of prefabricated steel bridges used by the Allies in the Second World War to replace destroyed bridges and make new river crossings in the field. As well as being indispensable to the war the bridge was a trendsetter. In essence it was a life size Meccano set; a kit of standard parts that could be made in many factories and assembled on site without needing lots of specialised equipment. And because it was modular the bridge could be as long or short as the gap it needed to cross. All this is was to the credit of Sir Donald Bailey, Rotherham born and trained in engineering at Sheffield university (the bridge and its contribution to the war earned him the knighthood in 1946).

 

Just upstream is the large Walk Mills weir, sitting well below the level of the road its various sand banks seem to be a natural spot for the local bird life to congregate. On opposite bank once stood Walk mills, cutlers grinding works and a fulling mill, complete with head and tail goit running under what is now an office block and car showrooms. A little further on, zig-zagging through the railway arches is a modern descendant of the Bailey Bridge. To link up the path with the main road through the Wicker a suspended bridge takes us through the arch spanning the river. The spindly structure contrasting with the dingy damp arches has led to the nickname 'Cobweb bridge' and a spider motif has been hung from the arch above. Emerging onto the main road we can spare a glance up at the grand arch and notice the patching up on one section where a bomb smashed through in WW2.

 

The circle is complete, returning to Kelham Island the visitor can see some of the most striking relics of the past in the museum. Looking on from a distance we might see large clouds of steam escaping the building. This is the exhaust from the largest item of the museum’s collection - the River Don engine. Built in 1905 this huge steam engine first lived at a Cammell company works in Grimesthorpe. It moved to the River Don works and ran there until being retired after a lifetime of work in 1978. It was built by Davy Brothers in Attercliffe, in works that stood on the opposite side of the river from the path at Burton Weir, and was used to drive the rollers for rolling armour plates. The three horizontal cylinders mounted on the top of the engine create about 12,000 horsepower at the drive axle - about the same power output as 2/3rds of the Formula One starting grid. That axle is cut off now, the engine powers nothing except the admissions to the museum. Because of its venerable age it only runs a few times a day rather than constantly as it did in its working life. It is also considerably cleaner than it was when it worked. Old photos show the green paintwork and brass fittings - now immaculate - coated in grime. An modern steam boiler located in a nearby room generates the steam but the engine itself is still operated manually, much like a railway engine, by a driver, only this driver stands high up on a catwalk looking over the room. When run the engine is slowly warmed up for a few minutes before being unleashed at full speed for a few thunderous seconds. The Don Engine routine also includes its party piece; because the engine powered armour plate rollers it needed to be able to reverse to send the ingots back and forth through the rollers. Most conventional steam engines can theoretically do this of course, but nothing changes direction like this engine. Thanks to the reversing gear mounted around the crankshafts the three huge bearings can stop and run backwards within a couple of seconds.

 

At one end of the engine a huge 50 tonne flywheel completes the picture rumbling around furiously. The mechanical ballet of the engine in full cry, shaking the floor and reversing in a moment is over all too soon. The big green relic is gradually slowed to a stop and the steam vented out of the cylinders, creating the artificial cloud that floats out over the local area. While it's moments of life are all too brief it could have been killed off for good in the flooding of 2007, hundreds of thousands of pounds of damage was done to the engines base and internals by the water and it took several years of work, often voluntary, to bring it back.

 

It seems a fitting end to our journey through the miles and centuries, with one of the last remaining places to experience the world of Sheffield steel and the Don Valley as it once was. There are still works and steel makers around today, and some artisans (or "Little Mesters" as the local slang has it) keep some trades alive. But the world that once was here cannot come back, for better or worse. way. The air is no longer the thick grey soup of smog that blackened the bricks, but the hard but fulfilling lives that so many workers once lived have been extinguished forever. Still, despite the changes the city survives to the future, and with increasing development concentrated in the old industrial areas. The building of new flats and offices mean cranes are a constant feature of the skyline. In a few years these places that once seemed hopeless and desolate are coming back to life. That we have experienced a scenic walk where was there was dereliction and can see more and more construction and greenery shows there is still more life to come in the city, and in more than one sense.